The Fairground
by quinault
Summary: [August, 1938] A fairground, a bet, and two children who will never be the same again. — A Tomione fairground AU. Oneshot.


He stands motionless in the midst of the crowd, the masses ebbing and flowing, swirling and parting all around him. A river with no purpose, no direction in particular, simply moulding itself to the rise and fall of the landscape. A dizzying phantasmagoria of sights and sounds, blazing electric lights and the overpowering smell of food, dings and clangs and peals of laughter from all directions, the small voices of children, booming voices of announcers upon their stages—and of course, himself—small, unnoticed—at the very centre.

A red and white striped banner hanging above the park entrance cheerfully spells out: _Welcome to the Hampstead Heath Fairground!_

Tom Riddle has never been to a fair before.

The intensity of the noise is almost too much—the sheer number of people nudging past him, all eager to see the wonderful sights before the sun set and the night crowds in all their numbers descended upon the rides. Rows of stalls stretch out before him on the grassy park grounds, nearly overflowing into the main street that was closed for traffic in favour of additional parking space to the visitors.

It being August, the holidays were already in full swing and hundreds of families had descended upon the grounds, all bent on taking full advantage of the fair's last day before it packed up for the year. Sun tanned young men joked and clapped each other on the back, housewives in neatly styled hair lingered in the shade to scold flighty children, or absentminded husbands, while others simply sat to escape the full strength of the noon sun. It was made even more unbearable by a recent heat wave working its way through the city, encouraging the more well-off to flock to the seaside or holiday resorts while those who could not afford to leave their businesses or who simply could not afford a holiday did their best to alleviate the heat with makeshift fans or pouches of ice pressed behind the neck. Today the heat felt more like a wool blanket hanging in the air, waiting for the right moment to fall and suffocate them all.

Tom feels a bead of warm sweat trickle between his collar and down his back as he squints down the radiating concrete road and throws an envious glance at a man lounging on the grass in a light cotton shirt. The orphanage uniform feels smothering today, but there is hardly anything he can do about that. He does not have the luxury to pop into a department store to buy a decent shirt, neither does he have money to buy proper shoes—ones that had not been mended three times over with glue yet still lifted at the heel every time he crouched down.

He'd already spent the majority of his ten pence on the bus ticket here, if he wasn't more careful with the rest he'd be taking an evening stroll back to the orphanage.

The majority of the teachers and matrons had taken their leave weeks ago due to the holidays. It had been a ceremonious affair filled with well-wishing and the few who remained were glad to leave the children to their own devices between the hours of breakfast and dinner, given that they finished their daily chores as usual. For most of the boys, this meant a perfunctory washing of the lobby steps or a hurried scrubbing of the breakfast plates in the kitchen basin. The quicker you were done the more time you could spend in the yard playing with the other children. It was a routine Tom did not look forward to, having grown accustomed to both the discipline of cold school mornings and to the hard teachers. As much as he despised them, he understood their expectations, their petty grievances, the exact amount of push it took to bump you up from six to twelve of "the best" lashes.

Needless to say, he was not particularly popular amongst the other children, not that he could give a damn what any of them thought. Most of them were imbeciles, content at being common to the core—middling students and brainless bullies who didn't give a shilling whether they were headed to the lumberyard or the cobbler's shop once they reached leaving age. The disgust and hatred on his part was balanced by fear and apprehension on theirs. He knew they sensed he was special and he knew they were frightened of what he could do; the great and terrible things their minds were too feeble to comprehend even if their eyes happened to catch the odd glimpse. He knew they were frightened because they could not explain what he did, could not compare it to the simplicity of classroom brawls, the clean-cut routine of alliances and falling-outs, broken slates and broken noses. They could not understand him so they practiced the only thing they knew how; avoidance. The occasional bully would arise of course, but Tom was always more than happy to remind them the taste of fear they seemed to have forgotten.

It was this usual routine that Tom thus found himself in two weeks into the holidays, bored out of his mind.

He'd taken to sitting in the library after breakfast, sifting through the collection of religious texts and ratty picture books for anything worth reading, settling that day for Dickens' _Great Expectations_. He had already read it of course—there was little in the library that had not yet passed through his hands—but given the fact it had been at least three months since, he thought it was as good as anything for whittling away the hours till dinner.

"Which have you got? Let me see!"

Tom's ears had prickled at the voices filtering through the open window of the library. Craning his neck slightly from his seat had allowed him a fair vantage point on the three boys squatting in the shade of the courtyard below. A thick-set ginger by the name of Eddie that he recognized as being a year older than him and two younger boys he'd once seen around the corridors doing chores.

A makeshift football of rags and strings sat on the cobblestones in front of them, forgotten for the time being as the boys chattered over a deck of cigarette cards spread in front of them.

"Whiteside again! I got at least six now. How 'bout you?"

"Bryn Jones" the scrawny one grinned triumphantly, jerking the card away from the grubby hands of the boy next to him, a pasty soft looking boy referred to as Rudolph by the other two.

"They're bloody rigged, I tell you. Keep fillin 'em up with nothin' but Blackburn Rovers and scrapping all the decent players! If I get another Ernie Thompson, I swear I'll flush the lot down the toilet!"

Tom had tuned out their tedious tirade to get back to the book but any chance of focus had soon disappeared.

"—heard the Duke of Windsor's comin' down!" Rudolph interrupted enthusiastically as the scrawny boy snorted.

"Who cares 'bout some posh bastard when Tornado Smith's gonna be there ridin' circles round the place!"

"Really? Where'd ya hear that?"

"Sam the peddler left the flyer yesterday, see? Says there'll be a real Bengal tiger too! And an Indian fakir in cloth of gold! Reckon he'll be levitating?"

"Don't be ridiculous. It'll be a bed of nails, if anything. My cousin saw the act two years ago and he said the nails went straight through and he went straight to sleep after as if they were nothin' but a tickle! An Indian shish-kabob!"

Tom had listened to the dialogue with a yawn and the prickling of a headache in the works. Who cared about a tiger some sweaty idiot wheeled out in front of snot-nosed children for a couple pence? It would probably be scrawny and lame anyways, like the one he'd seen four years ago on the summer holiday trip to the London Zoo. He'd been as eager as the other boys then, elbowing past them, leaning as far as he could over the railings to try and get a peek at the fearsome beast he knew only from story books and a ratty volume of William Blake's poetry he'd unearthed from the orphanage library.

 _Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night; / What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?_

Except there had been nothing fearful about the one-eyed filthy creature stretched out in the middle of the enclosure, nothing but matted fur and bones. He'd smelled something foul, only to track the odour to a chunk of rotten meat chucked in by some zoo worker days ago—more a feast for flies and maggots than a beast of the Sundarbans the information plaque had claimed it had originated from. Furious and disillusioned, he'd looked around for a rock to throw at the pathetic thing to force it to get up, show its claws, jump the railings and tear apart whoever had reduced him to such a state. But the rock may as well have been another fly—it had continued to lie there on the dirt, not even stirring to defend itself. He couldn't remember ever hating a creature more—even now, the memory made his heart pound with rage.

And yet, he couldn't say the idea of getting away from the dull routine hadn't been appealing. It had been too long since he'd last snuck out to roam the streets of the city and he was itching to clear his head of the disgusting scent of disinfectant and carbolic soap the matrons were practically guzzling down his throat at this point. It had been in the dining hall as he sat devising a plan that the letter had come. The woman had turned positively white reading it—the sudden illness of an estranged sister, one Martha Cole, as he had later learned loitering by the ajar door of her office. Quite serious. Likely tuberculosis. Should probably make a day of it if she hoped to say her final goodbyes _etc. etc._ What it really meant was there would be no one watching the gates until the nightly senior officer arrived at nine in the evening. The grin that had broken across his face then had been positively…Euphoric. A huff of air had escaped his chest in the form of a chuckle and he'd had to swivel around the corner to keep out of earshot. It was honestly too perfect.

She was even taking that bitch Haverford with her—a heavy-handed matron who had joined the staff only a few months ago but who'd quickly become the real authority figure at the orphanage, allowing Mrs Cole to dedicate herself fully to her fun little hobby of drowning herself in gin and vomit. The woman was as narrow under the pudding-bowl haircut as she was a beast under the dress, and a religious fanatic to boot, lugging around a worn out bible everywhere she went like it was an extension of her arm. Wool's might have been a Baptist institution but the woman was a vocal admirer of "good old-fashioned Catholic discipline," taking no less than fifty boys into the yard everyday for canings with crimes ranging from running in the corridors to, as in the case of one boy, speaking the broad Manchester dialect. Tom had rather enjoyed watching the daily festivities, especially the run-and-leap theatrics she was fond of before bringing the cane down on the back of the unwitting victim. It had been nice to know there were people out there working selflessly to perfect even something so crude into an art. Yes, he'd been enjoying the bitch until she'd caught scent of him and got it in her head he was the spawn of Satan himself, even going so far as to poison the rest of the matrons into her bible thumping mania. He no longer needed to commit any crimes; he was a criminal for simply existing.

The vision crashes into his mind without warning.

A vision of twisted roots and twisted ankles, bruised knees from kneeling on cold flagstone, the slap of leather belt on skin, ringing in his ears, doubling over, taste of iron in his mouth, _die die die,_ spit it at her face, bloody grin, shock of a backhand across his jaw, _burn in hell, bitch—_

The unwelcome reverie is only broken with the motion of someone bumping into him. Only when he looks down does he realize his fist is clenched. He makes an effort to relax, feeling the blood rush back into his fingers. His heart continues to beat wildly.

No. He wouldn't think of any of that now. He would bide his time. He would wait until he could make the cunt pay for what she'd done, until it was _her_ at his feet choking on her blood, wailing and begging him to stop. He would look down into her eyes then, _knowing_ he was the only thing between her worthless soul and those fiery pits of torment she liked so well and he would _smile_ as he sent her there by his own two hands.

 _One day._

But not today.

He marches onward, into the heart of the fair.

* * *

Hermione stares at the multi-layered ice cream sundae with a scowl. As though sensing the heat of her gaze, the top layer begins dripping, creating a sugary slush of strawberry-lemon underneath. Her eyes trail the single cherry as it slowly slides down from its peak and submerges in the quickly rising ocean of sugar.

"Darling…" Doris Granger pleads. "Do be reasonable." She twists her mouth in frustration at the stubborn silence that follows, throwing a look that seems to say _help me out here_ towards the bespectacled man seated next to her.

"Listen to your mother now, Hermione" he says rather absentmindedly, leafing through the newspaper spread on the table before him. "You don't want to upset her, do you?"

Hermione sneaks a peek at her mother, leaning slightly forward in her seat, her heart-shaped face pinched and tired, and feels her resolve slowly weaken. She sighs and uncrosses her arms.

"There, now. No need to be cross is there? It's a beautiful day, the sun is shining! We're going to have a lovely family outing, perhaps we'll all go on the roundabout, how about that? Your father thinks it's very thrilling, don't you dear?"

George Granger's eyes move intently over the politics section of the Daily Record, not having heard a thing. The sharp jab of an elbow at his side soon brings his attention back to the conversation.

"O-oh. Yes, of course. Quite the thrill."

But Hermione doesn't buy the act. The whole point of them coming to the fair had been for the rides! She had been looking forward to it ever since her tenth birthday, that Holy Grail of an age, knowing her parents would finally see her off onto the "big girl" rides with a smile and a wave instead of the usual stern hand on her shoulder and a vague _perhaps next time_. Although the disappointment had stung each time she could say with pride that she had never screamed or thrashed about the floor like _some_ children might have in her shoes. (Rachel Dickson certainly came to mind. The girl had a pair of lungs on her; her shrill tantrums were a source of daily annoyance and _she_ only lived next door. Hermione felt sorry for her parents.)

She had been clinging to the excitement all the more for the last three days after Mrs. Granger announced the visit to her Gran across the city. _We'll drive down to Hampstead and give her a nice surprise!_ She had announced as Hermione had lingered at the foot of the stairs in her night gown, still drowsy from sleep. _Put on your clean stockings and come down for breakfast. Quickly, darling._

What she had not expected was that they would stay the night, or the night after that. As much as she loved her Gran, Hermione had sighed at the news. What could she hope to do in a house of porcelain knick knacks and doilies for three whole days? It might not have been so bad if she'd had a grand old library like the rich dowagers from her stories. Or even just a small, well-stocked one. As it happened, Hermione had to content herself with sewing magazines and Woolworth's mail order catalogues. _Gentlemen everywhere agree these summer season dresses are to die for!_ She'd stared at the advertisement with no small confusion. Dresses that killed men? How could such an item be sold to the public? She'd had the strange vision of department store dresses jumping off racks and around the necks of unsuspecting shoppers, the poor shop owner attempting to explain to the police the sudden deaths of all these men. _It was the dresses! They came out of nowhere, I say!_

It was only when she'd started walking listlessly back and forth the house that her parents had finally relented. Perhaps some fresh air would do them all good. _Go on,_ her Gran had said with a kind smile. _Don't you worry about me. The attic needs a good sorting out; I'd probably be poor company anyways. Bring back a caramel apple for me!_ She'd laughed, and the matter had been settled.

Or so it had seemed. But as soon as they had spotted the ride—the Moonrocket—her mother had pressed her lips together in a thin line and a distant look had come over her father's face that suggested the idea of placing his little girl on the contraption was becoming less appealing by the minute. After a bit of worried discussion, they had gently urged her out of the line with apologetic eyes and the promise of making it up to her. When they had stumbled on the ice cream parlour at the edge of the park they had treated it like godsend.

"Roundabouts are for small children" she finally speaks, trying to make her voice as mature and reasonable as a ten-year-old could manage. "I just don't understand why I can't try the Moonrocket, even just the once. Nellie's mother was perfectly fine with it" she tries.

" _Nellie's mother_ is perfectly fine with a great number of things, and I'm not sure whether those things are in the best interest of a young girl" her mother replies disapprovingly. "Imagine all the things that could go wrong—a machinery malfunction, a loose safety bar…"

"But they're quite safe! They're inspected every year and whatever doesn't pass the test is used for scrap parts. I read all about it in the newspaper!" George Granger listens to her go on with amusement.

"I'm sure that's all true, but I'm sorry" her mother shakes her head slowly. "The answer is still no."

"You promised" she falters.

"I know, darling—"

But Hermione's already stopped listening. What was the use? Everything she said fell on deaf ears. She was sure the Queen herself could whirl past them in her garden party best and they would still claim the contraption a hazard to Health and Safety. A small voice inside her squeaks that she's being moody and terse, that she should let it go, that this isn't like her. She immediately crushes it down. She was not being unreasonable! She was sticking up for her rights! Bowing her head, meekly accepting such a verdict would have been…Been…Foolishness!

There is a dripping air conditioner in the corner and she stares at it with the stubborn resolve to will away the tears welling in the corner of her eyes.

"Let's go home" her father suggests gently. "Your grandmother's making her famous lasagne" he says in a conspiratorial tone that makes the corners of her lips quirk in spite of herself.

They're halfway back to the parking lot when her father halts in his tracks.

"Drat" he mutters meeting Doris Granger's inquisitive eye. "Candy apple" he elaborates.

"I can go buy one" Hermione offers. She recalled seeing a little group gathered around a candy apple man just a bit back.

And…perhaps she'd have time to stop by a few attractions on the way back.

The tiniest of peeks, of course. It wouldn't even take five minutes.

* * *

"Step right up, step right up, ladies and gentlemen! The show is about to begin, and if this ain't the wildest one why, I'll eat my hat! That's right, it's the Collins' Strange Curiosity show back again for seconds! Prepare yourselves body and soul for the stttrrraaannngestt spectacle in the world! We got Donnie the Dwarf, Hoppin' Four-Legged Sally, Zip and Pip the Pinhead and so much more! Better hurry because tickets are selling like wildfire! Yes sir, this is the place to be if you're looking for excitement this evening! We got everything from—"

Tom leans against a crate watching the man selling tickets. He waits until he's distracted counting change before grabbing a corner of the tent and slipping inside.

If he had thought it was hot before he's in for a treat. The tent is _sweltering,_ filled to the brim with people all clamouring to get a glimpse of the raised wooden platform of the stage. Men work their way through the noisy crowd selling corn on the cob, and by the number of them littering the ground it seems quite the popular snack.

He manoeuvres through the throngs of people, trying to get as close to the stage as he can manage, as he passes a woman he catches an undisguised look of disgust flash across her sour face. He shoots her a smile so wicked she turns away shaken, tugging her child to her side.

Hanging limply around the tent are cloth murals performing improbable feats of flexibility. But one in particular catches his attention: a large python with rippling scales wrapped around an exotic looking woman with glowing copper skin, its jaw hanging open, fangs inches from her face. The whole scene is frozen in time—the woman perpetually seconds away from being devoured, the beast never quite managing to snap its jaws on its prey.

The text underneath spells THE SNAKE ENCHANTRESS in dramatic capitals.

 _Well obviously not a very skilled one_ , he scoffs. He'd never seen a real python before—or any serpent besides the weak-looking garter snakes that would occasionally hide amongst the tomatoes in the small vegetable garden the matrons kept. Somehow, they always managed to find him. It had been a revelation of the biblical sense, that first encounter when he had learned he could not only understand them but _speak_ to them. And they had been eager to speak back, whispering to him in their strange language of a world far more fantastic than this one of grey walls and meaningless rules. A world filled with his own kind. A world of _magic._

Even now the word feels odd on his tongue—almost comical. What he could do was the stuff of gods and legends. And to label it with that fairy-tale term—

It was insulting. No. _It was blasphemous._

The revelation had not come easily either way. He remembers how nauseatingly eager he had been to learn more—to learn _everything,_ to tear this brand new gift of a world upside down and inside out until he was drowning in it, _drowning in magic._

But instead, the creatures had decided to turn mute overnight. They had offered him a tantalizing glimpse into a mysterious world—a world that could very well have been _his_ world, the world he was meant to be a part of from the beginning—before snatching it back without a single explanation. Even the threat of violence had not worked to frighten them into compliance. It was as though they had been taunting him—he'd be digging in the dirt of the vegetable garden—meant by the matrons as punishment, most like. He no longer kept track—and feel their eyes all around. Looking up only to find yourself the centrepiece of a hushed stadium. But maybe that wasn't quite right—there wasn't the sense of charged anticipation in their silence like one might expect before a football match **.** If that had been the case, he might have put and end to their pesky curiosity much earlier. Instead, it was the static silence of the crypt that greeted him, wrapping around him, almost suffocating him. And sometimes, when he would stand up too quickly after having been bent over the dirt for hours, he'd imagine the vitreous gleam of human eyes where there should be those of a snake, and then in a flash, it would be gone. He did not know what it meant. Nothing, most like—it had not been the first time his imagination had run away with him in the mind-numbing tedium of daily chores.

One morning, finally having had enough of their silence, he had taken a knife to one that had decided to do its staring of the day at a closer distance than usual. It had slipped away in a trail of blood and entrails and that had been the last he had seen of any of them.

But his attention is drawn back to the stage when he notices a surprisingly respectable looking man in a smartly pressed suit stroll up to it, still in the midst of a few words with a man from the audience. He nods and sends the man off before hopping onto the stage with a winning smile.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" He booms. "Welcome to the Collins' Curiosity Show! My name is Freddie Collins, your host for the evening. I must say you lot are looking sharp this evening! Have you taken something?" He gives an impish smile at the light laughter that results. "That's what I thought. Now, before I shut my trap and welcome our first act I'd like to tell you a little story! One I'm sure many of you mothers will understand all too well. The story…Of a young boy lucky enough to be born to a loving mother—a _healthy_ young boy as any mother might wish for, and brought up decent by her own diligent efforts, that is until—the _curse_ set in. Now, I'll let you decide if this curse was brought on by our young boy or by the ugly hand of fate that dealt him a sinner of a father! For a sinner he was, and a man so vile in his drunkenness he'd beat his devoted wife half to death and rise up the next day not a spot on his conscience! Well, God is always watching, and as it happens in that funny way of life the man comes home one evening in his usual drunkenness, does his ungodly thrashing and promptly falls asleep to his poor wife's wailings. Except for one thing: he doesn't stir come morning! And what should the wife find but a stiff dead drunk! Well, she prays her gratitude to God for His mercy and makes sure her young boy knows it was a life of sin that claimed his father from him. Urges him with tears in her eyes to lead a clean life, to come off the road his father had already started him down. A road of profanity and untruths and unlawful companions! And the boy, moved by his mother's earnestness, embraces her and exclaims _I should not like to stroll down any road away from dear mum!"_

He waits out the stream of chuckles and _awws_ with a sad little smile. Tom fights the urge to scoff. What in hell was this nonsense?

"Well the boy does keep his word. Where he'd once kick and scream every Sunday his mother is now delighted to find him early to rise, and with a heart open to learn. And this lasts a fair many years, all until the boy turns eighteen. I see some of you shaking your heads! What a shame indeed, the difference between ten and eighteen! How much danger coils waiting for a child between each passing day! I _urge_ you parents to be wary of those years as you would be wary of a stranger living amongst you. For they are strange, and treacherous, and like to _snatch_ your child from your very bosom into a life of gambling and drink and all manner of degeneracy you can think of!"

"And in spite of his poor mother's pain, her tearful pleas, _his own word mind you_ —in spite of it all! —he got in with bad company, and from there slipped into the fast life. Just like his father! Can you imagine the shock to a mother's nerves, ladies and gentlemen? Pleading with him not to go, unable to sleep a wink until he returned in the dead of night, stinking of the pub! And more than anything…. The heartbreak. The heartbreak of seeing he does not even care for his poor mother's suffering. Even when the shock has her fall ill. Even when she turns frail and bed-bound. Even then he does not fail to march out every night, and she must feel again the pain of knowing his wretched companions are worth more to him than his own flesh and blood. But do not forget this, ladies and gentleman. God is ever watchful. _And when He sees_ —" He drops his voice low and hard, as though confiding some profound secret he has mulled over his whole life.

"—When He sees the wicked having their way with the righteous He wracks His justice!"

All around him, the crowd nods and mutters approvingly.

"Yes!" Collins exclaims with a pointed finger. "And when God saw this mother— _this righteous, long-suffering mother_ —finally give her last breath, abandoned and forgotten thus, he _struck down_ the wicked son in the middle of his degenerate ways!" He makes a slashing motion in the air. " _Struck_ him down so that he wouldn't forget the weight of his crimes, for as long as he lived. Ladies and gentlemen, see the power of God's judgment yourselves! Here he is in person! Lenny The Wicked Invalid!"

The applause is sparse and reluctantly given, and soon replaced by gasps of horror. For the thing that limps onto stage isn't a person at all, as the story had all but gushed about, but a grotesque creature. The man's hunchback, with a spine so extremely curved that his head hangs staring directly downward at the floor. He clutches at a cane with bone-knuckled intensity but even that does not seem to help his hobbling. Slowly, as though recalling why he's on the stage in the first place, he shifts his beady eyes sideways towards the audience.

Tom stares at the pitiful thing with revulsion.

"Go on, Lenny." Collins urges. "Show them."

In response, he slowly turns around to show the extent of his deformity.

A moustachioed man in front of him shouts with surprising vehemence: _"Monster!"_

"Now, now, let's settle down folks. Lenny is a reformed man now, aren't you Lenny?"

But the man only continues to stand silent, as though the frosty gaze of the audience has worked its way into him, frozen him solid to the stage.

In a sudden motion, Collins is across the stage, grabbing the man roughly by the shoulder. He seems to mutter something in his ear before slinking back to his end. The man looks shaken.

"Y-yes. Indeed." He finally squeaks. "A changed man through and through, all thanks to M-Mr. Collins. When he found me I was but a godless wretch but he—he took me in…He t-took care of me, put me in his show…I will always owe Mr. Collins my life, especially the…"

" _Ugh."_

Tom gives a sideway glance at the source of the outburst. Pinned rather uncomfortably between an overhanging belly and the bulky backside of an unwashed-looking gaff lad is a girl. She stares up at the spectacle with an expression of almost comical concentration. As though something rather sour has slipped down her throat and she's fixing all her efforts to summon it back up. Tom would have found it hilarious, if it weren't for the tongue she seemed to have summoned up as well.

"How can they just…Display him like that!" She mutters to herself with a shake of her curls. "Like an animal! It's absolutely inhumane!"

Tom did not harbour any love for the creature, nor had he believed the simpleton tale the man had worked so hard to impress. _Struck down by God._ He'd nearly snorted at the thought.

And yet inhumane did not seem quite the right word. Cruel, almost certainly—the man Collins had hardly hidden his distaste for the creature. Inhumane, though, implied an act a human being would not do, when in reality there was very little human beings would not do, especially if there was either pleasure or profit to be had in it, and by the number of people packing the floor it was obvious wheeling out a freak or two was a lucrative business indeed.

Tom shifts his attention back to the stage but the girl's inane tirade soon makes any kind of focus impossible. He lets his eyes fall shut in annoyance for a moment before turning to face her.

"How about you keep your idiotic opinions to yourself?" He drawls. "Some of us are trying to enjoy the show."

He smirks at the shadow of shock that passes over her face, as though she's never received the smart of a good _shut up_ in her life, which, at second glance, may have been true. The same aura of soft naiveté hung about her as most of the children at the orphanage **.** Like she might startle into a faint if he were to suddenly go…Boo!

"Well, I don't think anyone should be enjoying this." She says indignantly. "It's not right to take advantage of someone's misfortune. Look at him, he's miserable!"

The man indeed seemed as though he wanted to sink below the floorboards and halfway to the centre of the earth with the way he was frowning. Tom shrugs.

"So? Do you think he'd be happier elsewhere? If he suddenly decided to up and leave do you really think the good people of London would open their arms for him? Look around you. These people paid to see a monster and they were still half a minute away from stoning him to death had it not been for that sentimental slop."

She's silent as the man scampers off the stage at last and Collins immediately jumps into another lightning-fast spiel.

"Or were you considering a nice career for him?" Tom continues conversationally as he joins the applause at the next act walking onto stage. A jaunty dwarf this time. He makes a show of searching around for three red balls before beginning to juggle. "Maybe a teacher or a dancer? _No—_ " He decides. "A police officer! Fancy him chasing down criminals by the look of their feet! Although it would be a handy excuse with the loose women, I imagine. Couldn't bloody well help but stare at the bosoms could he?"

He catches her wrinkle her nose at that before choosing to ignore it.

"There's got to be a better option for him than taking on this ridiculous persona."

"A better _option_ would have been God striking him down for good."

For the first time she looks directly at him, horror written in her caramel eyes. "How can you say that?"

"Easily. There's no hope for people like him. And if you can't see that you're a real imbecile. _Tell me,"_ he turns, meeting her indignant gaze. "If you're so morally outraged by a man with a bit of a curve why are you even here?"

She turns slightly pink as she contemplates a response. She crosses her arms.

"That's none of your business."

He silently studies her. Tightly pinned glossy curls. Shirtwaist dress _._ Unhemmed. Tom knew girls like her. They were commonplace at Beacon Baptist—the church he and the other orphans were marched off to in crocodile columns each Sunday without fail. They would occupy the front pews, sitting prim and straight right beside their parents. Perfect angels the congregation would flock around at the end of service, pinching and patting and cooing at and their idiot parents all the while polishing them like the shiny red apples they were. _My my, you've learned to read already? Our Beth is going to be quite the lady of letters! How many hymns have you memorized? Clever girl!_

And they actually had the nerve to think themselves _better_ than him. 'Shabby Tom from that poor orphanage around the corner.' He would throttle them all if he could. Show them what _insects_ they really were. And this girl was just the same.

"Run away from mummy and daddy, did you?" He sneers. "To the _scary fair_ to see the _scary monsters_ they warned you about?"

"I did not! I'm only…Passing by." She says rather weakly, but by the colour blooming on her cheeks it's obvious he's hit the mark. "And you're one to speak! I don't see your parents around either!"

"That's because I don't have _stupid_ ones like yours to keep me on a leash."

"What, so they just let you wander alone? In a big fair? All by yourself?"

A look of boredom passes over his face.

"Of course. Let me sightsee and go to the pictures. Even dine alone if I want. Just last week I was down at the Savoy."

It wasn't a complete lie. His excursions into the city were most often filled with wandering the districts around the orphanage. He knew Stockwell like the back of his hand and could draw a map of South London with his eyes closed, streets and roads and all. He was quite proud of it. The back alleys, as dirty and dank as they were, were a reminder that Wool's Orphanage was not the sole monument rising forth from a turbulent ocean of depravity as it was made to seem. It was a reminder there was a whole world out there filled with people: swindlers and schemers, drifters and dreamers and that though for now he was forced to survive in the circumstances he'd been dealt, one day he would join that world. He would find his kind—those the snakes had whispered to him about, with the remarkable abilities just like him. And then one day he would no longer need to survive. He would _live._ He would rise above them all.

"The Savoy?" He can hear the poorly disguised disbelief in her voice. "The Savoy _Hotel?"_

"Of course the hotel" he says impatiently. "You didn't think the only son and heir to Hopkins-Prescott would dine anywhere, did you?"

He sees her opening her mouth at that, before a strange look comes over her and she closes it again. It's her turn to study him now.

"What's your name?" He asks, more for conversation than anything else.

"Hermione." She says, rather unwillingly. "Hermione Granger."

"Well, _Hermione_. I bet you're full of hot air. I bet—" He pauses before donning the most saccharine smile he could muster. One he knows could easily pass for angelic.

"I bet you wouldn't be able to last _one day_ without your precious mummy and daddy."

"That's not true! And I can go on any of the rides here too!"

He smirks. "Yeah?"

"Yeah!" She stares up under her lashes at him with surprising ferocity.

"Fine. Then do we have a bet?"

"What are the stakes?" She asks cautiously.

"If I win…" Tom looks her up and down as he thinks, finally settling on a ring with the appearance of gold on her right hand. He gives it a curt nod. "You give me that."

"And if I win?" She asks, fiddling nervously with the ring on her finger.

"Then...I'll give you a prize."

Hermione narrows her eyes. "What kind of prize?"

"A special one. You'll see."

She hesitates for a second, seeming to become aware of how suspect a deal made with a stranger really was. But the moment soon passes, replaced by a hard stubbornness. With a defiant lift of the chin, she extends her hand forward. Tom meets the handshake.

"Then we have a deal…"

"Tom." He finishes for her with a smile. "Tom Hopkins."

This was going to be more fun than he'd thought.

* * *

There was something deceptive about bad ideas. They never seemed very bad at all once you were making them—it was only after, such as when you lay cosy in your bed at night, that it all came crashing down around you. Bad ideas, like vengeance, liked to lie in wait and ambush. You had to be brave from time to time and check in the bushes and under the bed for Bad Ideas, that is, if you didn't want to be pecked apart by a screeching swarm of them later on.

For the hundredth time that day, Hermione wonders if she is making a mistake.

She considers calling off the whole ridiculous bet. Considers running back to the tree by the gates with a candy apple and apologizing for being so late. Considers forgetting she ever met the strange boy with the strange boy with the puzzling words.

But that's just the thing: she _considers._

In truth, Hermione knows running back to her parents now would not only mean losing the bet—an idea she finds herself stubbornly resisting—but also failing the whole experiment. For she _has_ decided to see this as a sort of experiment. An experiment in adventure. An experiment in an outing that does not involve brief strolls down park lanes, six layers of jackets and sweaters (in the spring) and the prickle of watchful eyes.

And yet, Hermione remembers a time when it had not been so. A time when she would not have had to beg for an outing to the park, or an afternoon in the playground a few streets down. But it had all changed one Thursday, a couple of weeks before the end of the school year. She had come home bruised and miserable, and despite her best efforts she had not been able to hide her scraped knees, her scuffed palms, Bullying was nothing new for her; she had long since learned to bear the grunt of it in silent dignity, learned to keep her head safely in her books and retaliate when she could through her words. Playground scuffles were the unwritten rule of public school after all, why should she make such a fuss about it? Marjorie Lloyd, the chief instigator, was nothing but a pesky insect really, more annoying than anything else. Besides, she knew she would revel in her fear if she chose to show it. There was no guarantee running to her parents would change anything, not like the guarantee of her foe knowing she had gotten under her skin at last. It would be a silent defeat Hermione would have to carry the shame of for the rest of her schooling, and given the _joyous_ fact she seemed to have gotten into the same grammar school Hermione was set to start next year, there seemed to be no hope for escape in the near future.

So Hermione did her best to ignore both Marjorie Lloyd and her rat-faced devotees and carry on with her life.

Yet there was one thing that gave her pause above all else, put terrible whispers of doubt into her mind. Whispers that said they may be right after all. That there _was_ a reason she did not have friends…That she was abnormal…

She had been seven years old when she'd sensed it first. That was the time before the Raymond's had moved from next door, and when her mother could still invite Mrs Raymond over for tea along with her daughter Charlotte—a timid but cheerful girl just a year younger than her, and the first and only real friend she'd had. And then Mrs Raymond had got a new position as a secretary and her mother had offered to look after Charlotte in the evenings for a fee. She'd been so excited, thinking about all the hours she'd be able to spend with her friend! One of their favourite (and secret) pastimes had been acting out scenes from a small collection of plays her father kept in his study—secret only because many of the plays were first-editions, and George Granger strictly forbade the clumsy hands of children anywhere near the pride and joy that were his first editions. But Hermione always made sure to be careful with the spines which were the most sensitive parts of any book, and that they were locked neatly in her father's desk before he returned home so she thought that particular rule was a bit unfair.

The fact that Charlotte could not read had soon made things difficult, however, and Hermione had gotten it in her mind that she would be the one to teach her. She had waited one day until her mother slipped into the kitchen before she'd returned to the living room with the usual stack of plays. She'd asked her which one she would like to read that day and she'd excitedly pointed to one curiously titled _The Dog Beneath the Skin._

They had just gotten to the part where the dog is revealed to have been the lost heir of the Crewe family all along when, suddenly, the words had started to _tremble_ as if the book were a jelly cake that she had given a poke. And then the words had turned _liquid,_ sliding off the page and dripping down before turning solid, the letters slightly round and raised, all over the hardwood floor. Charlotte had turned to her, mouth gaping, and exclaimed _is reading always this exciting?!_

That had been the first time.

Afterwards, the incidents (as she had settled on calling them) had become sporadic, coming and going like the weather. She could never predict when the next one would occur, or what she would be doing when it came. The incidents had neither rhyme nor reason to them, she could not prepare for them like she could for an examination or the fingernail inspections the teachers liked to surprise them with. _Were_ there even any rules to the shadow-bird that had emerged from her silhouette one night as she sat brushing her hair before bed, flitting about the walls before melting back into darkness? And what about the time she had been walking to school one winter morning and a mound of snow had rolled itself into a snowman when she had _distinctly_ been thinking about making one later on!

She knew there was another name for what she could do, or rather, what kept happening to her. It was a fanciful word, one that looked safer on the soft vellum pages of story books than tossed about from mouth to mouth where anyone could hear.

 _Magic._

She could not pretend she wasn't fascinated by it, but it was a fearful sort of fascination. Like studying a queer feathery creature that could turn its fangs on you any moment. In the fairy tales, magic was either a thing you did or a thing that happened to you, and those who could do it were almost always magicians and witches, the occasional good fairy—certainly not anyone "ordinary." And she was. She was ordinary, underneath that façade of "abnormal" that was forced upon her by no want of her own.

And if she was ordinary, as she was so sure, this magic could not belong to her. It had to have been misplaced by its true owner, stuck onto her accidentally like gum on the sole of a shoe. And when its true owner realized what had happened, _when they realized she had taken something that did not belong to her—_

Hermione was afraid something terrible was bound to happen to her.

She had not told her parents any of this of course—how could she? She couldn't explain the incidents any more than she could explain the secrets of the universe. What if by speaking about it she put her parents in danger as well? After all, if magicians and fairies really existed out there there had to be a reason you did not simply see them walking about or shopping for groceries. Who was to say they'd take kindly to being exposed?

Besides _,_ she thinks with no small chagrin. They worry too much about me as it is.

Once her state had become known she had hardly been able to stop her mother from marching down to the school to have a few "hard words" with the schoolmaster. But she had returned home rather quickly and in an ever fouler mood than before.

"' _Nothing can be done about it'_ she had heard her say acidly behind closed doors. _"Too close to the end of year. 'Insufficient evidence'! She's been savaged and the fool has the nerve to tell me 'insufficient evidence'—"_

Third and fourth visits had been made, visits had turned into telephone calls, but all the same answer: nothing to be done about it.

Though she had been expecting it, she wasn't really sour about it. Over the years, the petty insults, the sabotage, the playground scuffles had become the daily battles of an inescapable war. A war that you inevitably had to fight alone.

To her parents, the idea was difficult to understand. Having received the sentence, they could not simply sit quiet and so they turned their efforts on her. She knew they meant well. She knew they were worried about her being pushed around again. She had always been quiet—what if that wasn't a quirk, but a symptom? Had she always been so lonely? Should they go to the doctor?

She had become the troubled child almost overnight. And she was _miserable._

In all honesty, the business with the Moonrocket had just been the last straw in a long line of events. Could she really be blamed if she wanted to escape, if only for an afternoon?

It'll only be a few rides anyways _,_ she tells herself. They'll hardly have the chance to miss me before I'm back.

* * *

People laugh and talk excitedly all around them, impatient for the thrill that lies ahead. Beyond the queue, Hermione spies a disc spinning in the centre of a wooden platform. Rocket shaped cars line the outer edge of it, going round and round in a dizzying, never-ending circle.

 _The Moonrocket._

She feels her stomach twist painfully and immediately scolds herself for it. Here was the very ride she'd been dreaming of for…For months! The wish she had made on her tenth birthday and had kept at the back of her mind ever since. She was here at last, and yet she felt anything but triumphant. It felt like the whole crowd knew what she had done—heads turning everywhere, whispers passed ear to ear of the wicked runaway in their midst.

Tom leans against the queue railings watching her. He chews a piece of gum he'd extracted rather unhygienically out of his pocket moments before. Very slowly, he smiles.

"You look like you're going to be sick."

"I'm fine." She lies. In fact, she can feel her stomach doing queasy jumps as though a heavy-footed giant had decided to use it as a trampoline. She doesn't know if she should label the feeling as nervousness or guilt, but does know Tom will use it either way to claim victory and there was no way she was losing so soon. Not a chance.

He raises a brow at that. "Suit yourself. But know if you vomit on me…I'll make you eat dirt."

Hermione winces. She had yet to get used to the quirks of his speech. Never in her life had she met anyone who said such nasty things in so casual a manner. Then again, she had never had a friend who wasn't a girl before. But that raised another question: did he even want to be her friend? In any other situation she might have hoped yes, but this was hardly a normal situation.

Besides _,_ she had to remind herself, he was a boy, and boys did not usually like to be friends with girls. They gravitated to their own species—other creatures that were just as loud and just as impressed by Buck Jones westerns and one-liner gangsters.

She had once seen two little boys fight.

It had been on a Christmas a few years ago at a toy store. She'd accompanied her mother to help pick presents for her cousins Dorothy and Mary. She'd turned down the back aisle only to come across two boys slapping and screaming on the floor. Well, it had taken a second to figure out they were human, and not a bundle of writhing limbs and hair as she had initially thought. When the metal fire engine they'd been fighting for had slipped from their hands and rolled to a stop in front of her she had been terrified. She'd half thought they'd maul her for it.

And yet, language aside, the boy in front of her didn't seem very wild at all. Quite the opposite, actually. He walked with the straight elegance of royalty, or at least one who had been brought up to imitate it. Nor did he sound like a child—when he spoke it was with the practiced eloquence of a radio dramatist or a politician. Hermione did not know what to make of him, and so she was forced to consider the story he'd provided.

 _You didn't think the only son and heir to Hopkins-Prescott would dine anywhere, did you?_

The whole thing would have sounded ridiculous if not for that name: _Hopkins-Prescott._ There had been all sorts of queer things about it in the papers recently…The owner was said to be famously odd—throwing lavish parties with champagne and balloons and jazz players. Except not for human guests, like ordinary people, but entire _menageries._ Zebras and monkeys in party hats, giraffes in bow-ties. A pool filled with eels! She'd nearly split her sides laughing when her father had read it aloud over the breakfast table.

So somehow, it did not seem _too_ out of the realm of possibility that this Mr Hopkins should have an eccentric young son roaming about dressed like a pauper. In fact, she thought she'd read something about a _Tom_ in the same article. No, she was sure she had. In any case, he certainly looked the part of some posh young heir. Hermione was not an expert on these things by far, but even she had to acknowledge the rather striking contrast his dark hair made with his smooth complexion, not to mention a straight pearl white set of teeth. One noticed these things when their parents were dentists. And when their buckteeth were teased mercilessly by vile girls who happened to be more fortunate in the dental department. Though not by any grace of their _shining personalities._

Thinking about her parents brings a pang of anxiety, which Tom must have sensed because he suddenly sneers.

"You couldn't look guiltier if you tried. Honestly…You're not actually worried about those strangers are you?"

Hermione shoots him a dark look. "Those _strangers_ are my parents. Of course I'm going to be worried about them. Actually, how are you so cold yourself? You ran away too."

"I did not _run away,_ I told you—"

"Yes, you can go wherever you want, whenever." She interrupts with a hint of impatience. There was more to the story than he'd given, she was sure of it. She just wasn't quite sure _what_ it was just yet. **"** But your father's got to be worried about you. Doesn't that bother you at all?"

"No. Why should it?"

Hermione gives him a queer look. "Because he's family, of course."

"Family…" He says the word with the same cool distaste one might have upon opening a kitchen pantry and finding a dead cockroach inside.

"Is that supposed to mean anything?"

She isn't sure if he is joking or not. "It's— _It means everything!_ Your family takes care of you. Loves you. Gives you a home."

Tom gives an ungraceful snort. "Everyone makes such a fuss about family. Family this, unity _that_ —It's all rubbish. Get down to it and you'll find there's as much _specialness_ to family as there is to maggots and rotten meat. You might think they care about you. _They_ might even think they love you, the gullible fools they are. But it's all a lie. They only love the idea of you. Polite little boys and girls that do exactly as they're told with idiotic grins plastered on their faces. One day they'll take a look at you and see a monster. They'll say… _This isn't the smiling little fool my love should be going to!_ And then they'll hate you, just as you'll hate them."

He says it all so effortlessly and in such an obvious manner that Hermione wonders whether he's speaking from personal experience. Could the eccentricities of this Mr Hopkins simply be a ploy to cover up a dark family history? She imagined it would be rather easy to pass off madness for eccentricity, especially if you were rich anyway and used to people believing whatever you said. Sane people certainly did not waste money on zoo animal extravaganzas.

"T-that's only for bad children who fight and steal and bully people to tears. I haven't done any of that…"

"But you have done other things." Tom looks at her quickly reddening complexion thoughtfully. "You've lied to your precious parents, and you've run off with a complete stranger you've only just met. And you enjoyed every second of it cause deep down you don't care about any of it."

"No!" Hermione cries desperately, doubt filling her to the core. "That doesn't make me bad! I just—just—"

"I could never hate my parents." She finally manages say. She tries to put the same iron into her voice as his, but it comes out more a squeak than anything else.

"Of course you could," Tom replies evenly before letting his lips quirk upwards into a humourless smirk. "You're doing it now."

Her heart skips a beat. _No, it wasn't true—It wasn't!_ She may have run away, but she wasn't wicked enough for that. She wasn't!

Her tongue feels heavy in her mouth—she doesn't know what to say. Thankfully, Tom chooses that moment to right himself. "Come on." He takes out the gum from his mouth, flicking it towards a patch of grass on the side before nodding towards the ride. "They're getting off."

And indeed, she can see the ride has finally come to a halt, men and women rising unsteadily from their seats and wobbling off the platform looking altogether dazed. A pair of heavily rouged girls step out of the rocket car closest to them, giggling hysterically as they pass her. She tries to shake off the uneasy feeling the conversation had left her with and focus her attention back to the ride.

And before she can question it further, she finds herself strapped in to a car herself.

 _Alright Hermione._ She keeps up the words like a prayer. _Calm down. Calm down, calm, calm—_

Her sweaty palms are sliding on the metal bar in front of her. Sliding! Surely that was a bad sign? What if she slipped right out of the car? What if she was hurled away into the horizon like a big cannon ball? What if—

"You're turning green" Tom remarks with what sounds suspiciously like delight.

"I'm…Not…" She starts to say but her words are soon cut short. She barely has time to grasp the bar in front of her before the car lurches forward at full speed. She feels her body get pressed in the opposite direction as the car makes a sharp turn, and then rushes around again, completing a full circle. With each turn, the wooden platform tilts a bit more until it feels like they're hurtling down a hill with each spin. A rocket tracing a dizzying belt around the moon.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!"

The screaming helps a little. Squeezing her eyes shut helps more. Blocking the flurry of noise is another matter, though. Her ears are pounded by the squeak of the wooden platform rising and falling, the thumping of the cars, the dings and chimes of various attractions, the shrill voices of camera-clad mothers in the side.

"Look over here, darling! A big grin! There you are!"

She throws a peek to the seat next to her, only to be startled by what she sees.

Tom is actually… _Laughing._ And it's not the cruel laughter he seemed to like so well. The one that echoed hollow and made you feel as if you had done something embarrassing and foolish, only you hadn't realized it yet.

No, it sounds…Happy. As if a ray of sunlight had landed on his pale face and swept the shadows away. She does not know how to react to the change.

Tom's spirits remain high even as they step off the ride.

"Have you ever gone so fast in your life?" He says breathlessly. "Not a match for the Duesenberg Model SJ, of course, but as close as you're like to get without blowing a fortune…"

The next few rides are no more tame than the first. Tom seems to have a talent for honing in on the fastest, most brain rattling rides in the fair, everything from whirling Waltzers and Mont-Blancs to the dizzying Loch Ness Monster—though that had done little but bruise her tailbone. She was certain he was doing it to scare her off. She sensed him watching her reactions to each one, as though he were waiting for her to panic or run away or something equally ridiculous. But funny enough, she hadn't had to pretend to enjoy them. It was as if the Moonrocket had been a practice run, because she actually found herself having _fun._

That did not mean, however, that her conscience was entirely clear. For all that she did, doubt still found a way to creep in and ruin her fun. She would be smiling and speaking excitedly one moment, and in the next she'd be miserable with the fear this was all a big mistake she would later torment herself about. Tom seemed to hate it most when she spoke her worries out loud though, and after the scene he'd caused by the ticket booth she made sure to keep quiet and squash all her worries right back into the awful closet they kept crawling out of.

Tom must have known he was losing the bet he had seemed so eager about, but curiously he didn't even seem angry. Most of the time, he simply looked blank, as if he were wearing a porcelain mask. His lips would move to answer her, and occasionally, a flash of some emotion would flicker behind his eyes. But any real feeling seemed to be confined below the surface, rationed and only allowed to come out for special occasions. It was as if he lived in another world. She wondered what it was like.

Tom stops in his track. Before she can protest, he grasps her hand and pulls her across the path towards a man behind a cart dripping with condensation from the steaming corn on the cob that is boiling behind the glass panes. For a second she thinks he means to buy some before she realizes just what's behind it.

Her legs freeze.

"No." She slowly shakes her head.

"Yes." A feverish light has entered his eye. He looks transfixed.

When she tries to pull away he only squeezes her hand harder.

"No. _No no no no no—"_

A bloodcurdling shriek erupts from the monstrosity that towers in front of her. Twenty-five metres of latticework metal and flashing lights that spell _Victory Dive Bomber_. She watches, horrified, as an arm rotates one of two twin pods up up up until it sits precariously at the very top. And then just…Falls. It hurtles forward towards the ground just as the pod on the other arm reaches the top. And back around again. A terrifying circle of death and insanity.

If she wasn't sick before, she sure is now.

"There's no way I'm going on that. You can't make me. No. Absolutely not. Out of the question."

Hermione had heard stories about hearts giving out mid-way during surgery. Her father's old friends from his National Dental Hospital days would often mention things of the sort during their get-togethers—and worse. She was sure she would go into "cardiac arrest" the moment she stepped onto the death pendulum.

But Tom doesn't seem to hear her. He stares up at the contraption, lips slightly apart, aglow in a frenzied energy he barely seemed to contain.

Well, he was free to live out his death wish if he pleased. But if he thought he could drag her down with him he was _sorely_ mistaken.

A look of annoyance flashes across his face when she repeats her protests.

"Giving up then? I knew you were too much of a coward for a _real_ ride anyways. Moonrocket." He scoffs. "Child's play." His voice booms with awe. "Now this—this is a ride for the fearless!"

"I don't have any money" she tries.

Tom makes a sceptical sound in the back of his throat. "You're an awful liar. You have another ten pence left."

Her brows draw together in confusion. "How do you know that?" Had he been eyeing her pocket money? But she only catches one of his condescending smirks as he passes by her and continues walking ahead.

She shakes her head to clear the confusion. "I can't go on that" she repeats. "My heart will give out."

"Then you can stay down here and watch me. In fact, why don't you sit by her," he nods his head towards some shrubbery where Hermione can see a waxy-faced old woman in a bathchair. She sits fanning herself with a folded newspaper next to a blonde woman laying out picnic utensils on the grassy knoll just behind her. "I'm sure you'd have _so_ much to talk about."

Hermione sniffs. "She looks quite sensible. Maybe I will."

"Go ahead. I'll wave at you from the the very top. You should be easy enough to spot with that frightful mane."

"I hope it hurls you straight into the sun." She replies tersely.

"Oh, is _that_ what you want?" His voice is a film of pure ice hiding an ocean of activity beneath. When he takes a half-step towards her Hermione instinctively backs away, her heel hitting a rock. "To watch me burn?"

She blanches. Why did he have to do that? Why did he have to twist a normal conversation into the disgusting and nightmarish?

"No" she says very slowly.

"No? Then how would you do it?"

"Do what?"

He's close enough now for her to notice the lashes framing his eyes. Thick and dark. Almost feminine. The corners of his lips quirk up into a perverse smile. "How would you kill me?"

He is clearly enjoying her discomfort as he stares at her half challenging, half intrigued. As if he is genuinely curious what she will come up with. Hermione suddenly wonders if there was anything he _didn't_ see as a game, anything at all that mattered enough to him to take seriously. _Dying,_ obviously, did not seem to qualify in that category.

But she finds she's having difficulty breathing, let alone speaking. The humidity is too much—all of it contracted into one tight ball and pressed into her lungs.

Tom chuckles darkly as he steps away, keeping eye contact all the while. His next words ring with conviction.

"You don't have the guts to do it. Just as you don't have the guts for real excitement. Look at you! Bet you've never had anything this exciting happen in your dull life and you're still moping about like some dozy brat." He sneers. "You know—" he continues, ignoring the fury simmering hot under her skin. "—You seem to be under the impression they would miss you at all. How do you know they're not home now, laughing and sipping wine, saying _what a relief we didn't have to get rid of her ourselves!"_

"You're vile. My parents love me."

"Do they?" He says flippantly. The cool tone of a teacher taking roll-call. "You're awfully sure of yourself. As if you possibly have any clue what nasty things go on in the heads of grown-ups."

"Oh, and you're a mind reader!" She exclaims, finally having had enough. "What kind of grown-ups have you known anyway? I didn't know it was thieves and murderers that dined at the Savoy!"

But Tom only laughs—a short punctuated sound like an exclamation mark.

"Thieves and murderers." He enunciates. "They're no different than the ordinary cretin with their _respectable_ positions and their laughable pompousness. They've only fooled themselves into thinking they're different, because their thieving and murdering is done nicely out of sight, on paper or by their money-crazed mongrels. And then they have their chauffeurs take them to their Riviera palaces so they can pretend to be the big men they are with all the other _respectable_ Bond Street idiots as if they're not all rotten to the core, the lot of them. The whole world is nothing but thieves and murderers. Some are just so good at pretending they've got the whole world calling them by other names."

Hermione shakes her head in disbelief. "Well you can think what you like but I happen to believe the world is filled with decent people, for the most part! Even if there are a couple bad eggs occasionally…But that's what people like lawyers and judges are for! To protect the decent people."

Tom scoffs. "That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard."

"Why, because it means having a shred of faith in people?"

He presses his lips together for a second, fixing on her a long, scathing look.

"Because by that logic everyone in the world ought to be hanged" he says candidly. "There are no 'decent' people you daft bint! And if there were they certainly wouldn't go about whipping the filth out of the 'bad stock' as if they were God Almighty's chosen imbeciles every one of them, clean and upright! 'The heathen are sunk down in the pit that they made,'" His laugh is short, cruel. "If that's the case hell must be crammed to the ceiling with God's righteous brutes!"

He stops himself, though the cold fury in his eyes suggests he'd like to say more.

"I'm done arguing with you. Stay here or crawl back home if you want, I don't give a sod. If I'd wanted to waste my time dabbing away tears, I'd have found myself a proper baby."

He takes a couple steps backwards, facing her the whole time.

"I'll make sure to picture your pathetic face as I savour victory. Right. At the top of the world."

And then Hermione is watching him stride down the short lane heading towards the rides, not even glancing back at her incredulous figure as he melts into the crowd.

She keeps standing there, even after cries of "three pence corn on the cob" is replaced by cries of "cool raspberry lemonade!" Until dirty plates have replaced the blonde's clean ones and a lanky ruddy-faced man sits conversing with her where there was no one before. She kicks her shoe against the trunk of a tree and watches as a paper-thin layer of bark peels off.

He was infuriating! He didn't have to leave her like this just because she didn't want to go on his stupid ride. Yes, she had bet him she could go on every ride here but what he proposed wasn't a _ride,_ it was suicide!

She sighs. What should she do now? She could head back as he'd said, try and find her parents…

But what if he was right? What if they had already forgotten her? Perhaps they really were relieved, being rid of the troubled child…

Something she'd overheard a week ago comes back to her.

She'd been sitting in the backyard studying the glossy pages of a world atlas she had unearthed from a dusty box in the attic. She had been so focused on tracing the bumpy outlines of the Himalayas that she'd almost not noticed her mother watching her from the back door, one arm crossed across her torso in the way she did when she was deep in thought and glancing over her shoulder at her father lingering just behind her. Hermione had grown accustomed to their concerned whisperings but for whatever reason, this had seemed different. For one thing, her father's usual benign expression was tight with worry, and though he usually preferred to observe and give his opinions sparingly when he felt it was absolutely necessary, this time he was speaking quite urgently. When Hermione had attempted to listen, the only words she'd been able to make out were "owl" and "boarding school." But they must have caught her listening because they had quickly shut the door and moved inside.

She'd turned the words over in her head until the early hours of the morning, searching and searching for the hidden meaning but in the end, she had only come to one conclusion.

 _They mean to send me away._

But there had been a problem with that too; if she wasn't to go to the grammar school next year, why keep it a secret? Surely they'd have to let the school know as soon as possible if they'd changed their minds about enrolment. And what did owls have to do with it? She didn't think she'd even _seen_ an owl outside of the zoo.

The next day she had sat around, waiting for them to mention the mysterious school but to no avail. After a couple days of business as usual she had decided she must have misheard. "Boarding school" could easily have been "ironing board" and "owl" …Well she wasn't sure about that one, but in any case it was nothing to worry over.

Probably.

The thing is she's not sure of anything now.

What if they really were planning on sending her away? What if they'd found out she was abnormal? Maybe they hadn't told her because it wasn't a boarding school at all, but a lunatic asylum, and as soon as she returned she'd find a doctor waiting in the living room and her mother would smile at her as he rose from his seat and he'd keep rising…rising…rising like a rickety tower on stilts _hello Hermione,_ and her father would be saying _you'll be all better now, darling!_ the creature reaching its talons into its crammed bag for an impossibly large syringe except the needle wouldn't be a needle at all but a jagged shard of glass and…and…

No, she absolutely could not go back.

She takes a few shaking breaths to steady herself, and then turns down the only path left to her. The path deeper into madness.

* * *

Hermione squats down amongst the stubbly grass and dramatically empties the contents of her stomach.

 _Huuuuurrrrrggghhhhh!_

She heaves a couple times after the job's done, for good measure, and then leans forward on her heels until her forehead rests on the tin surface of the caravan. It's hot to the touch.

Tom watches the ordeal with a mixture of amusement and disgust. After a minute, he tentatively breaks the silence:

"Are you done?"

The humour of the situation isn't lost on her. Hermione might have even laughed if she wasn't so utterly tired. She can only imagine how she must look to an outsider, with her bird's nest hair and dress still stained with vomit no matter how much she had scrubbed at the seams. Had the owner of the caravan they were presently loitering in front of chosen to return in that moment they would have been in for the fright of their lives. As it were, the entire compound with its rows of beaten down caravans and haphazardly parked lorries was deserted, and nothing save the flapping of sheets on the odd laundry line and the faraway dings and shouts of the fair could disturb the serene stillness that permeated the place. Even the chocolate brown lab Tom had been prepared to fight off upon wandering into its territory had been content to lay down in the dirt in his square of sunshine and go back to sleep. It was, in all respects, like stepping into a meadow, one could only appreciate the quiet after having trudged through the primordial chaos of the forest.

"…Your fault…" She mumbles as though half asleep.

"Hardly."

Slowly, keeping her head still leaning on the caravan, she turns to face him. An elbow propped up behind him, he reclines in the shade of a broken roundabout. A vision of leisure amongst a rusty heap of spare parts, loose gears and dismantled panelling.

"You can't be serious."

But he simply continues to lie there, not even paying attention to her, pulling out chunks of grass and letting them fall back down again.

"You practically goaded me on the thing!" She flinches at the loudness of her own voice and lets her eyes fall shut. Her head felt like someone had grabbed it and _rattled_ the contents until they turned to mush.

" _Please._ You're the one who tripped over your heels, chasing after me. Thought I'd have a heart attack, the way you came out of nowhere, shrieking like a harpy on fire. _"_

She glares. "I was not shrieking."

"What do you call it then? Singing? You ought to join the opera. You really hit the upper register."

He chuckles softly under his breath, clearly pleased with himself.

"In any case," he continues, "I didn't tell you to do anything you didn't want to do, whether you admit it to yourself or not. That's what's got you so angry. Being in control of your actions for once in your pitiful life and still _mucking_ it up—"

In a second, she's on her feet and at his side, towering over him. She raises her hand, making sure the entirety of her rage is concentrated square in the middle of her palm.

"Ow! Crazy cunt! What was that for?" Tom spits, clutching at the arm that was, no doubt, still stinging from the smack.

"For being insensitive and _foul_ and a-a—" She scrambles for words. "Tyrant!"

" _Tyrant?"_ He repeats rather incredulously.

"Yes, tyrant! Nothing's ever your fault, is it! You're so high and mighty that everyone else is just tiny ants to you, running about with no other purpose but to do your willing! And you just sit there, judging the whole time, like you're so perfect! You think you're king and everyone else your loyal subjects, but even a king has to earn the respect of his people or they're no king at all, only a mad person playing pretend! And then you go and leave me behind without even asking me! Honestly," She says with exasperation. "You're unbelievable."

The gaze Tom fixes on her is his usual mix of derision and dismissiveness but Hermione senses a watchfulness underneath, the cogs of the machine turning, analysing.

"I was under the impression you wanted out" he says slowly, a touch of careful apathy colouring his voice.

"I said I didn't care for your death machine, not that I wanted to up and leave! You know, for someone who acts like they've got everyone figured out you're awfully quick to jump to conclusions."

"Hm that's rather funny. Tell me, out of the two people here who is the one covered to their elbows in vomit? You were awfully quick to change your mind about the _death machine_ once you realized there wasn't a soul in sight you could torture with your whining. Or was it the abandonment?" He tilts his head sideways ever so slightly, teasing her on.

"Did you cry at the thought of being alone, all by yourself amongst the rapists and the thieves and the child abductors? —They could be anyone you know, hiding in plain sight." The matter-of-fact tone of his last sentence contrasts with his previously ironic tone. The sole parenthesis in a dense page of text.

"Oh, be quiet. You're just angry I won the bet."

But the more she watches him, the more something strikes her as odd. Only the vague itch of a feeling, but she can't shake it off, do what she may.

It dawns on her gradually.

She stares, dumbfounded. "You didn't care about the bet at all."

The shift in Tom's face is small. Almost non-existent.

But it's enough.

"That's ridiculous" he drawls. "Would I put myself through the torture of your company if I didn't want to win?"

But a strange clarity has come over Hermione. The thicket, the mass of brambles, the confused brakes of her thoughts all untangle in one great twist and she can see far far far into the horizon _._ How had she not seen it before? _How?_

"You wanted to see what I'd do" she continues carefully. "You were…Curious."

Her voice sounds far away from her as though she's detached from her own body, hearing herself speak from behind a thick curtain.

" _You—_ You wanted me to follow you?"

When Hermione looks up again she can see Tom has stopped picking at the grass.

Instead, he studies her with a gaze equal parts intense and calculating, the kind of gaze that backtracks, retraces every step left behind, weighs and reweighs every word spoken with an obsessiveness bordering on mania. He does not speak. He does not move.

Hermione is just starting to be unnerved by the act when, in a moment, it ceases. The connection severs.

And then…He breaks into a wondrous smile.

"I wasn't sure before…" She hears him mutter under his breath. The voice of one waking from a trance. "Wasn't sure you'd be worth my time…Didn't think you were worth anything."

He is looking at her like he's seeing her for the first time. A piercing gaze fixed on her with the singular intent of cataloguing every shred of light and shadow he happened to find.

"…But you are a sly little thing aren't you?"

She scoffs, thoroughly uncomfortable. "I haven't a clue what you mean."

"I think you do. Trying to pass off as the wet blanket all this time, but you've been having your fun haven't you? Think you know who I am?"

"You're mean and you're a rat and you don't take anything seriously. Doesn't take a genius to figure out."

"No?"

"No. You're quite transparent, really" she sniffs, smoothing a crease in her dress. "An open book."

Tom's answering smirk is one of genuine amusement, and more than enough to throw her into a state of utter bewilderment.

Hermione had always been a good reader in every sense of the word; in fact, all her teachers swore up and down to it. There was was no secret to it really—she only paid attention to the goings-on around her. Whether it was a classmate's birthday, or how much sugar her aunt took with her tea she would be the one to remember. Hermione liked knowing these sorts of things and more—it was fascinating and astounding, being able to piece together the character of someone by their mundane possessions. She thought if people realized how much of their lives they lugged about on shirts and bootlaces, they might have given another thought to what they put on each morning.

And yet for all her boasting she had never met anyone more difficult to read than this boy in front of her. It was infuriating! She didn't know a thing about him, other than the fact he'd lied to her. "Bet" her foot! He'd only been _bored_ and she'd been nothing but some mildly entertaining thing to pass the time with! But the worst thing was, she'd played right into it. And for what? To win and watch that smug smirk slip off his awful face? Well there'd been no point to the torture at all because there was no stupid bet! He must have enjoyed leading her on a merry goose chase. She should have just let him fling himself into the sun like she'd intended to.

In a flourish, Tom stands up.

"I think it's time you got your prize."

She scoffs. "Oh? So now you change your mind? In case I haven't made it clear enough I don't want _anything_ from you" she says indignantly. Despite her words she can't help the few bits of traitor curiosity from stirring up. She watches him look around on the ground, searching for something, before disappearing behind the roundabout.

He returns after a few moments, right fist clenched and palm facing up.

Probably a dead frog or something equally nasty, Hermione thinks with disgust. She crosses her arms, resolving not to show any curiosity whatsoever at the mysterious object.

But when he slowly opens his fist she can't help the gasp that forces itself out.

It's…. A bracelet. But not of gold or silver like the ones her mother wore for the New Years party she and George Granger attended each year without fail. No inlaid jewels or swirling intricate patterns. Instead, it's utterly unique; it gleams with the light of a thousand little shards of glass, all melted together into one solid band. She holds it up to the sun and watches it transform into a rainbow-coloured halo.

"Where did you get this?" She asks breathlessly, feeling her resolve fade away. He merely smiles mysteriously.

"Nowhere special."

"It's beautiful" she mutters. He seems pleased.

"Sun's going down" he says after a few minutes, interrupting her daze. "Best get out of here. I'd rather not get caught by whoever owns this dump, would you?"

* * *

Still absurdly angry about the business with the bet, Hermione had insisted on choosing the next ride. "Compensation" she had called it in a haughty tone that dared him to argue, and for once Tom had not bothered.

It seemed they had not been the only ones to think it however, for the dodgems platform was already overrun with squealing children. They battered into each other in such wild madness that the whole scene looked sped-up next to the yawning outlines of parents waiting in the shade beneath the platform. Hermione had wanted to go in the queue, before she had seen the length of it and decided against it.

Instead, they lean against the wooden railings of the platform, a cone of ice cream each—purchased by Hermione with the last of her money and costing only a fleeting look of guilt this time. He wonders if it is her conscience that has grown lighter, or whether she has finally realized the futility of it all. When you had already crossed the Rubicon what was the use wasting thought to the bank left behind?

He can hear the girl speaking in an easy fashion, friendly almost. He does not remember ever agreeing to be her friend. He isn't even sure he likes the concept—friendship had always seemed to him a mutually agreed upon pact of blindness. It only worked if each party succeeded at overlooking the other's faults, like a blind man walking through a cave with only the brush of his fingers on the wall to lead him in the right direction. It was a shadowy business, whereas Tom preferred to fight his battles in the stark light of day.

A rare gust of wind rolls through, causing the cloth fringe of a stall to whip in reckless abandon. Tom watches as a sign goes tumbling across the lawn and a scruffy-looking worker rushes out to secure it.

 _Dammit, John! I told you to tie that thing properly!_

 _Yeah, yeah why don't ya tell Dom about it, been cutting work all day—_

Hermione raises a hand in an attempt to sweep the hair that has flown in front of her eyes—he honestly had no idea how she tolerated that beast—leaving Tom eye to eye with the bracelet dangling on her wrist. His bracelet, made with his magic, not that she was any wiser. He didn't think he would ever grow tired of saying that: _his magic._ The magic that pumped through his veins, the magic that was his birth right. His, his, _all his._

It was nothing but a pretty trinket, to tell the truth. But Tom had owed her a trophy and so a trophy he'd forged. Dirt and magic and magnificence…It might as well have been a piece of him dangling on that dainty wrist.

But she was still speaking. He decides to listen.

"…that was the last time, and we had to copy the same poem into our exercise notebooks. Some say there's no money in reading books but I don't believe that for a second. After all, writers most definitely have to read to write anything good and there must be money in writing or why would anyone try to write anything "of value" as grownups like to say? Though I think that just means stringing together the most difficult words you can find in the dictionary. Do you own lots of books? You must have more to spend on such things."

Was he imagining the hint of suspicion in her voice? No, she was only guessing, just like she had been the last dozen times. He fights the urge to snort. Did she honestly think wording everything as statements would make him not realize what she was doing?

If the charade itself hadn't been so entertaining he would have put an end to her mealy-mouthed nonsense long ago. But it had been too long since he'd had the opportunity to hone his acting skills and this Tom Hopkins role might put him in the pictures yet. Oh, he was real to be sure, though by the accounts in the papers he might as well have been the living dead, coddled to death and kept indoors at all times for fear of 'contracting germs.' There had been entirely too much about both Hopkins-Prescott and that buffoon of an owner in the papers recently. Why fame was wasted on the idiots of the world, God only knew.

He vaguely wonders if he should step up the whole act. The posh drawl had done the trick—and he _was_ quite good at it—but something more dramatic couldn't hurt. So far, he occupied the top two floors of the Hopkins Tower alongside an incompetent manservant he'd make sure his father fired soon—one too many burnt shirts—the replacement would be an American, because class resentment got tiresome, and servants didn't know their place these days, The Savoy was only on the _Thursdays_ otherwise his _dear_ nutty father took to terrorizing the few decent servants, so difficult after Mrs Hopkins' death—a reluctant tear or two here—but they had to live on of course, maybe if he'd known the warm love of a _mother_ growing up he would think more highly of the _wonders_ of family life but he would never know now, would he? His father drove a Hispano-Suiza J12—all his when he was older but he'd sell it of course, why settle for an old model when you could get the best and newest?

She could keep up her inane guessing game all she wanted. She'd never get anyone but _Tom Hopkins_ out of him.

And perhaps having realized this, she changes topics.

Tom realizes she seems to come back to the topic of one girl in particular. Older, bully type. She actually _cared_ what her halfwit classmates thought of her, the poor fool. So desperate to belong, as if their kind could ever understand let alone appreciate the different, the unique, the ones that refused to conform to their laughably simpleton ideas of right and wrong.

The only wrong in this world was letting them forget who you were.

And then the memory claws up again—the memory of blood on flagstone, falling to his hands and knees, coughing. He'd wanted to kill her. He'd wanted to tear her apart, bash her repulsive head against those flagstones until the she choked on her screams, until the bone fractured like an egg and then _more_ until the skull turned to dust and blood sat caked and crumbling on the bruised broken unrecognizable face. When he thinks of how weak—weak _disgustingly weak—_ he'd been he nearly turns blind with rage. But the worst is knowing the magic had _vanished—_

Knowing it had abandoned him when he needed it most _abandoned him_ like everyone, _everything else—_

One day he'd make sure she regretted what she did to him. Regret it to her last scream. He would never be put to his knees again, never again apologize for what he was. Never…Never…

"—I'd have taught her a lesson" he cuts Hermione short. "Thrown her down by the ugly ginger hair, given her a good thrashing about the teeth. Should have been enough to teach her to hold that tongue."

Underneath her disquieted demeanour he can see a glint in her eyes; she is listening intently.

"And what if she got seriously hurt and had to go to the hospital?" She asks with a casual raise of the brows. "What would you do then?"

It occurs to him she doesn't sound offended, the way she puts it. It's as if the girl is merely a rather tricky arithmetic problem—one she's curious how he'd solve.

He shoots her a look from the corner of his eye. "Then I'd be rid of her for a good month."

"Ok, let's say she told her parents."

"She wouldn't."

"How do you know?"

The smirk that dawns on his lips leaves just enough to the imagination.

"I'd make sure of it."

She shakes her head and looks away, but he knows her well enough now to know the idea sticks to her. She looks haunted.

"Force," He continues. "Is the only language their kind understands."

This is something he, for some reason, wants her to know. It's a lesson he has learned the hard way, on the mud of the schoolyard ground, the stomach-scraping nights spent shivering uncontrollably in the damp of lightless hallways. And always the fading step of matrons, their fleeting glance pretending blindness to it all. Force was the only way, so long as they never saw you coming, so long as they never had an explanation for the bruises, the broken bones, the cut skin. So long as the magician retired each night, his secret safely tucked away with him.

He thinks she will understand what he's saying, given the fact she was marginally less idiotic than he'd initially given her credit. He got the feeling she was different—she'd _seen_ what others had only guessed at. She'd drawn back the curtain and she'd seen _him,_ nothing more than a glimpse really, _but still—_

And she had stayed.

He'd cast her off thinking she would crawl back to those pathetic parents of hers—she was _salivating_ at the idea of toadying up to those imbeciles, even now. For all that she may have assumed he had certainly not expected her to follow him, _to stay._ He didn't think she knew what it meant _._ She threw it around carelessly, not understanding the weight, the fullness of it. The years and years that clung to a word like that, like dust to a museum display. Ancient. Permanent.

She should have known he would not let her leave again.

* * *

The shadowy orange glow of the setting sun is one of thousands of candles on the verge of being extinguished. It gives the timeless quality of memory to the scene stretching out before them—gypsy vendors with their crystal trinkets and shrewd smiles amongst hoop-la stands and shooting galleries plastered with promises of improbable prizes. Tom can see the majority of them on this side of the park are either unattended or in the process of dismantlement. Sweat-browed women make a quick work of the stalls, taking down banners and signs, packing toys and figurines away in crates until August came around again and they would be needed once more.

Less people too. It seemed the families had already finished their scuttling, eager to get away before the night crowds descended in all their degeneracy. And indeed, Tom already catches a vagrant throw him a gap-toothed grin from the corner of a stall he's squatting besides. A series of light bulbs strung on overhanging wires swing from the breeze, giving him, if only for a moment, a pair of dark pits for eyes. A sight that would surely have had any other ten-year-old clutching their mother's skirt in terror. But Tom merely makes sure the vagrant catches his gaze before breaking into a sneer.

Tom briefly wonders what it would be like if _this_ were his life. If he were to decide, right now, that he wasn't returning to the orphanage, who could stop him?

He could stay here.

He could wait until night and sneak into one of those dirty caravans with the gypsies and the freaks. Get far away. A simple life for sure, and filled with backbreaking labour, but one without the likes of Haverford and her ever-complicit cronies.

With a sneer, he pushes the maudlin nonsense out of his mind. As if a troupe of swindlers and strangers would simply open their arms to a no name orphan. Oh sure, they might pretend at first, soothe him with kind words and pretty promises. But they would be biding their time. And then first chance they got they would abandon him, dump him onto the streets to starve. They might as well cut his throat. To explore a city was one thing; Tom did not fool himself into thinking he could survive being homeless. Not when the whole damn continent was screaming bloody war and the food shortages starting to make even the factory owners look skeletal.

Even if they did let him to stay he would never be one of them. Orphans were orphans in every city of the world, at every age. Like a vulgar stain that couldn't be scrubbed off, no matter how raw and red you made the skin.

One day he would rip the skin right off. Tom Hopkins, Tom Riddle…Nothing but masks, all of them. They could never come close to describing what he was. Underneath that mortal façade was something without name, something that churned silent beneath his sinew and his blood, waiting for the moment it would be freed. There was no name for what he was. No name for the feeling he got when he lay in bed at night unable to sleep, when the oppressive darkness of night wrapped around him like a shroud. It was then that he felt he was dead already, dead and merely waiting to be reborn into whatever cold wildness clawed under his skin. No name.

 _Not yet._

But there was something else that made him hesitate. Something the snakes had said before disappearing back into whichever hell they'd slithered out of.

 _You won't be here much longer._

He wrestles with the thought in his head. He hadn't believed it, still didn't. The filthy creatures had been fond of riddles after all, why should a frankly threatening statement weigh so heavy in his mind? Adoption, the miraculous reappearance of absentee parents…They were all fairy tales told to wide-eyed children who'd probably fling their wailing little bodies down flights of stairs otherwise. There was no one coming for him. No one coming for anyone. You could either act the bitch with its rear in the air, slobbering for the next kick or you could bare your teeth and rip the masters' throats out.

If they were so bloody eager to rescue him what were they waiting for anyway? He was already too old to be adopted, and with war looming in the horizon no family wanted another mouth to feed, let alone a grimy good-for-nothing that was just as likely to run off with the silverware as play the fine older brother to _little Suzy_. Even the stinking bundles of blessings that used to go like hot cakes were now starting to pile up unwanted in the nursery—a fact Mrs Cole did not shy from loudly bemoaning in the few moments in which she could actually string together sentences. But maybe that was it, maybe they were waiting on purpose. What a _lark_ it'd be for them, to show up to those gates only to learn poor Tom's died of hunger or some disease only the day before. _Such_ a tragedy, if only they'd known to come sooner but of course, it was the war to blame and the Germans—an abomination it was, the suffering of innocents!

"Hey! You!"

For a moment he thinks the sound is a continuation of his musings before it becomes too insistent to ignore. He turns around slowly, woodenly.

Lingering by the metal fence in front of a game of Coconut Shy is a man. Tall and athletic, he might even have passed for a dandy had it not been for the ill-fitting trousers, the shirt that had nearly lost its colour after one wash too many. As it were, he had the look of a man who had fallen on hard times long ago but refused to admit it. As though realizing it's really him, the last bits of doubt on his long face disappear to be replaced by hard indignation.

"So it's you" he spits as he walks up to him. " _You know_ —I wasn't sure from the back. But then again, you're quite good at hiding, aren't you?"

"Tom?" From the corner of his eye he sees Hermione saunter over from the stall where she had been watching a game of hoop-la moments ago. "What's going on?" She asks nervously, sensing the tension.

Tom sneers. Some lunatic with too much time, obviously.

"Who the hell are you?"

"No, I don't suppose you'd remember me" he continues, eyes not straying from his face. "It was my little brother you dealt with, with your tricks. Thought you'd never show your face again in this neighbourhood. Not after what you did to Jack."

 _Jack._ It hits him then. Yes, he remembers him—one of those clumps of foul-smelling scum that tended to glue itself to your shoe no matter how carefully you treaded through the steamy rot of the city's hidden corners. He'd had a love for fists and knuckles so Tom had promised to show him a real fight. _Something you'll never forget._ The warehouse he'd found by chance, though it had been quite obvious what it was even at a glance; illicit activities always gave themselves away, if you only paid attention. The imbecile had kept grinning even as he'd showed him around the crates, sticky fingers all over the smuggler's merchandise. He had been eager to fight, would hardly abide waiting five minutes. He'd thought the whole thing fantastic; an exotic locale, an action scene straight off some superhero film. It was only after when the gun for hire had returned that the grin had been wiped from his face. Or so he imagined—he had left the place too early on to enjoy that particular scene. To return to your warehouse only to find some brat's been lurking about your snow…He could only guess at the bloodshed.

"Lucky to be alive he was! Couldn't even feed himself!" His eyes turn impossibly wide with fury.

Tom is already bored with the show. Did he honestly expect him to apologize for the brat's idiocy? If anything he should be thanking him for the life lesson he nailed into his _darling_ brother's skull. God knows he had no better use for it than bunting it against anything that breathed.

But Tom realizes he is waiting for a response so he slowly, leisurely, stretches his lips into a glass-sharp smile.

"Pity. We had fun together, Jack and I. And he _was_ rather popular with, what was the name?" He pauses, pretending to think. "The Wilkinson's? Reckoned I'd introduce him to a few other families—good to get an early start in the business life. Who knows? Darling Jack might even thank me someday."

The look in the man's eyes is fast becoming unfixed but Tom is not afraid of the likes of him. In fact, he's almost craving the chaos at this point, craving the opportunity to tie this loose end for good. It was funny that way, _chaos._ Too much and everything turned meaningless, too little and nothing changed. Only by inflicting a sufficient quantity of it could you deliver order back into the universe.

"Boys on the block know you you know, _Tom Riddle—_ Haven't exactly been subtle with your little tricks— _"_

A muscle in his jaw clenches.

Sound is suddenly far-off; the distant drone of a radio turned on in another room and promptly left forgotten. All he's left with is blood—the primal rhythm of it, hot, rushing, _throbbing_ in his ears.

The edges of his magic _flare._

"—Think you were so sly did ya? I don't give a damn if you're an orphan. You could be a bloody saint for all I care! You're gonna answer for Jack. You're gonna answer for my brother!"

He vaguely registers Hermione saying something urgently but he is shaking too hard to hear anything besides the dull thumping of his heart, his pulse aligning with the beat of that word _that damned word—_

 _Orphan—Orphan—Orphan—Orphan—_

He would destroy him. He would tear him to _pieces. He would make him suffer_ —

Absently, he sees the man's hand slip into his pocket before he lunges forward in a blur of metal and motion. But Tom is ready for him.

"Fuck!"

He falls to the ground in a groan just as Tom lowers his arm, transfixed by the blood that trickles down the steel of the pocket knife in his hand. It quivers as it clings to the edge, an ever growing crescent shaped band, before dripping off one by one in beads. The earth turns crimson at his feet.

"You're bloody insane!" He yells half-crazed as he presses his shaking fingers to his side, his cheeks somehow turning even paler when he sees them come away red.

Tom watches the feverish display with the blankness of the euphoric. He feels then that the sensation is all there is and all there ever would be. He lets it wash over him in ablutions, lets it sharpen his senses into that rare higher form of violence one could go their whole life without experiencing but he knew all too well. The violence that does not rush, does not take by force in the crude explosion of animalistic emotion but moves the hand with the soft touch of the guide. Bliss does it all become then. The screams, the bruises, the blood. Bliss the trail the hand leaves behind and _bliss_ every drop of precious chaos.

He takes a step closer, breathing evenly, _purposefully—_

—But the man's shouting is starting to attract a crowd.

Workers lean out of their stalls, people stop in their tracks, craning their head to see where the commotion is coming from. Tom sees a man stop sweeping in front of a stall as two men in uniform jog past. He looks him in the eye as he points straight at him.

"Come on" he hears himself say, not a second to think before he finds himself grabbing Hermione's hand.

They run.

* * *

She doesn't let him get far.

"You're barbaric!" Hermione crashes into him with a shout forcing Tom to grasp at the crooked tree behind him to keep to his feet.

"Oh, God! No, they wouldn't know any better, you're worse than a barbarian! You're a murderer!"

With a start, Hermione realizes she's crying. Fat tears well in the corners of her eyes which she angrily rubs away. Why should she be the one crying when it was him who was the monster! He who had ruined his life without even the decency to react properly, just standing there watching like he—like he _enjoyed_ it—

She feels dizzy with the knowledge of what he's done. As if it was _her_ who had held the knife instead, _her_ who had carelessly taken a life. She pushes her shaking hands through her hair and sways on her feet, nearly slipping down the sharp grassy incline of the hill they found themselves on. _It won't hide us it won't hide us nothing can hide us now—_

"—didn't kill him you dolt!" He's saying fumily. "Oh, go ahead then. Cry! As if you understand a _damn_ thing! Do you even know what he was going to do?"

The smooth mask has dropped at last, forcing Hermione to confront the blazing white rage that had lain, coiled and waiting, beneath the handsome features all along. It contorts his features into an unearthly fury bordering on mania.

"Do you know what he _wanted_ to do? He'd have gutted you open right then and there without a second thought. You think he cared if you were a child or not?" He scoffs humourlessly.

"You could have called for help!"

"Yes, I'm sure they would have been kind enough to pick up whatever was left of our remains. You really are an idiot if you think he wouldn't have slit our throats in a second!" He hisses in one long breath.

"You stabbed him!"

"Before he could do the same to us! God, you can at least act like you're grateful I saved your worthless life!"

Hermione can't hear this right now. She needs to get away; she needs to get far away from him and this place until she could think clearly again. Until she could understand the size of the mess she found herself tangled in.

She turns her neck sharply, following his figure as it paces from one twisted branch to the next.

"You'll be sent to prison" she says with finality, pinning him down with a long, hard look. "Those policemen will find you soon enough, there's no way you can hide forever. And then they'll lock you up for what you did, with all the other vile criminals to warm your—"

Tom is on her before she can finish.

They fall to the ground in a scuffle of yanked collars and flying elbows and cursing. She breathes out a muffled cry and digs her knee into his side to get his arm off her throat to which he responds by kicking back and pulling her hair. Her eyes water. She bites his hand. He curses.

"G-get…off m-me!"

And then they're finally free of each other and on their feet again, breathing heavily, each surveying the other wild, hungry, poised to attack. Hermione feels as though electricity is crackling the air, leaching into her legs, her arms, transforming her just as it's transforming him until she's half convinced she's not a person at all but a long-extinct beast, a crude patchwork of fangs and claws and terror barely held together by the force of her own sheer desperation. She has the striking intuition that _this_ is what he'd wanted all along, not friendship, but someone to mirror his savagery.

And just like that, it's over. When she blinks Tom's face is once again cold and unreadable. He straightens himself silently, like one in a deep sleep, and sits down some distance away on the hill. He turns his face away as Hermione feels the last of the feral energy drain out of her.

What had happened to her?

She plops down, leaden and more than a bit numb, and buries her head on her bent knees.

How had she gotten here?

She would give anything to wake up in her own bed right now, wake up and realize this whole thing had been nothing but a strange and terrible dream that would by the end of the day slip into the realm of things-that-can-no-longer-haunt. She feels like a rocket whose motor had sputtered and died out at last leaving her stranded thousands of miles away from home in a frozen inhospitable landscape. Left cold and alone without any hope for rescue, and on top of it all, she had chosen the journey.

"He called you Tom Riddle" she says softly, finally breaking the dead silence.

When he doesn't respond she raises her head to stare at his lifeless form on the grass.

"He also called you an orphan."

"Tom?" She tries again.

But the light in his eyes has vanished, leaving behind only the shuttered shell of a house. It frightens her. If he had disappeared into his own world, then that meant she was truly alone here, in the quickly darkening wilderness. And if she was alone, there would be nothing to stop the wild throbbing of her heart or to keep the magnitude of what she'd done bouncing around the corners of her mind.

 _Oh, God what had she done?_

It's as if each beat of the dying light is waking her up from a long and fitful sleep. She is Alice torn from Wonderland at last, thrown into the sobering shadow of reality. Her mother's kindly face flashes in her mind before it melts into a cloud of smoke, like dust settling in the air, and then reforms into her father, peering up smiling behind a pair of reading glasses. She sees herself running up into his arms and him pressing his cheek to her hair and patting her back. _There, there did you miss me? I was only gone two days! How much did you miss me? That much, really! Come, tell me all about what you did when I was gone—_

 _"—Of course you can. You're doing it now."_

The words are a cruel interruption of her daydream. They turn her blood cold **.** She hadn't wanted to consider them at the time, hadn't wanted to admit to a shred of truth in them, but what was the use in pretending anymore? Pretending had only dragged her deeper into a nightmare. Tom had been right all along. She _had_ hated her parents. Hated them for their fussing and their worrying and their kindly concern when all she'd wanted was to be _ordinary._ Since it was so impossible for her to fit in at school, she'd made up her mind to at least belong in her own home. After all, she hadn't asked to be different—it was a big mistake, all of it. Once it was fixed she could simply be Hermione once more and then surely she would have friends again, like the time before this whole magic accident had befallen her. Once it was fixed…

The thought of the doctor sends a shiver crawling down her back. Would they do the procedure before sending her off to the boarding school then? Despite her previous resolution the thought of having the magic removed fills her with doubt. She has a feeling it would be painful and drawn-out and leave a big gaping hole in her chest.

An idea hits her then, one that seems to turn the very ground upside down in its implications.

What if the magic had been _hers_ all along?

It was outlandish at best, the kind of thing you would expect to find in fairy-tales where the wishes of children actually come true. But if it _were_ true then that meant she was meant to be different all along. It would mean it was a part of her, just like the maddeningly frizzy hair and the buckteeth her parents wouldn't fix no matter how much she begged. It hadn't been easy, but over time she had come to accept those odds and ends of her appearance as simply…her. Crooked and imperfect and more than occasionally _infuriating_ as they were.

Maybe magic was the same. Not an accident, but a part of her.

She couldn't make any promises, not when she could still be wrong, but she decides she will give magic a chance. She could…She could…. Yes, she could speak with her parents! Convince them to put the doctor and the boarding school on hold for now, until they could understand what this magic truly was. And who knows? Perhaps she wouldn't need to be the troubled child for much longer…

Caught up in burgeoning hope, she nearly forgets the colossal mess she still found herself in. How could she have thought running away would fix anything? But that was the problem. She had been so lost in her anger and her hatred she hadn't thought of anything _._ She thinks of how worried they must have been while she'd carelessly been running about and feels the misery sink back under her skin.

"It's true."

He says it so softly she almost thinks she imagined it. She slips out of her reverie by degrees.

"Hm?"

"I said it's true." There is a tautness about him as though he's concentrating all his energy in the admittance. Hermione connects the pieces fairly quickly.

"You're not the millionaire heir to Hopkins-Prescott."

He doesn't respond. She takes it as affirmation.

"Why did you lie?"

His scoff sounds forced. "Does it really matter?"

"I suppose not" she mumbles.

In truth, it doesn't come as a surprise. She had suspected, of course, that something wasn't quite right about his story. No millionaire's young son would have been allowed to roam a vast and unpredictable city like London on their own, however 'modern' his family may have been. She was rather shocked at herself for ever falling for the idea. Not to mention the inconsistencies—Hermione was no expert in these things but the real sons of millionaires probably didn't go around criticizing their own class quite so openly. Middle-class had seemed a better fit at further thought, but an orphan? Orphans were supposed to be hungry little things, deprived of the anchor of family by some tragic twist of fate.

She presses her lips together as she studies him. Could this boy opposite her, a boy of nothing but sharp words and animal instinct really belong to that same group of unfortunates?

The silence that follows grows more and more charged until, in a single burst of electricity, it explodes. Tom whips around to face her, seething.

"Don't. Don't you dare."

"What did I do now?" She stands up with a sigh.

Tom's lips are stretched into a sneer of such pure loathing that Hermione catches her breath.

"Don't give me those big sad eyes, you're going to make me puke. You think I want your revolting _pity?"_ He hisses, rising to his feet. "You don't even know what it's like, being condescended to by every pretentious piece of scum just because of this filthy, worthless name! Nothing but brainless imbeciles the whole lot of them, once you bleed them the _precious_ money and connections they're engorged with, but all spitting down at you cause you were born to a dirt cheap name and a whore of a mother" he laughs sharply then, a dark gleam in his eye. "That's what they told me you know, when I was old enough to ask. _'You'll never be more than the dirt cheap name your whore of a mother gave you.'_ A bit poetic, if you ask me. Could almost be Shakespeare."

"I'm sorry," she manages to say. She means it.

"I'm not. You know why? Because they'll be choking on their words soon enough. I'll make sure they truly understand the _magnitude_ of their worthlessness next to true greatness."

A queer look flashes behind his eyes. He closes the distance between them in a stride and grasps her upper arms.

" _Come with me._ "

As he straightens himself she absently registers the pink trail of nail marks mottling the white of his neck. Had she done that?

"—You're clever enough, too clever to waste your life trying to please those simpletons. On my own I—" He hesitates, as though loathe to admit any weakness, before giving a sharp shake of the head. "Anyway, it's impossible. But two people. _Together—"_ His eyes are wild with the truth that seems to be dawning on him by the second, cheeks flushed pink with excitement. Hermione has never seen him so alive.

"—We can be anyone we want to be."

It's a simple statement, one that would have sounded juvenile on the lips of anyone else, but the deep conviction that rings through it transforms it into one of profound truth. Tom is watching her with single-minded focus, waiting, perhaps mapping her very thoughts themselves.

He looks so…Hopeful.

Hermione memorizes the expression before shrugging free of his grip.

"I'm sorry," she repeats, gently shaking her head. "I can't."

It's as if the flood gates have broken.

Shock, pain, fury follow each other, slamming into his eyes on wave upon wave. He teeters on his feet.

"Fine" he says hoarsely, behind a hasty mask of malice. "What are you waiting for then? Go!" He hisses dangerously. "I'm sure you've been looking forward to it all day— _waiting for the perfect moment_. Tell me, you were itching to do it at the Dive Bomber before weren't you? Or was it after the bracelet?" His eyes dart to the object still adorning her wrist and back to her face. "All you wanted was your pretty prize, wasn't it?" He says nastily, but makes no move to reclaim the object.

"No!"

"Then what!"

"I—I didn't—"

"Then! What!" He shouts, rawer this time. She can see the mask twitch and threaten to crumble under the sheer weight of her betrayal.

"—It was fun!" Tears are prickling the corners of her eyes again, making Tom's pale face swim in and out of focus. "It was fun," she says again, in a smaller, teary voice. She feels there's a price to admitting this and that she's paying it with a piece of herself, a chipped and imperfect piece of herself but her, nevertheless.

Because it _had_ been fun. The rides and the danger, the guessing and the never-ending arguments.

It had been fun before he'd gone and corrupted it—taken the good things, the ones that were worth crying over, and drowned it in blood and death until they turned sickly and warped, and the children never emerged triumphant from the woods at all, but grew barbaric and then lost themselves to the fairy-tale even as it rushed out of control, ripping itself to pieces as it hurtled on.

He had lied to her and he had toyed with her and he had never apologized for any of it, only elevated the game to newer heights once she had started playing along, fascinated in spite of herself.

But his world was too different, too bizarre. She could never survive it. More than anything though, she frightened herself. Frightened by what he could transform her into. Frightened by what she allowed herself to be transformed into.

It had been fun.

But she was tired, and in the end, she would always choose home.

His voice rings in her ears as she staggers down the hill. Out ahead, as though a thousand miles away, are the lights of the fair **.** Their twinkle is that of stars guiding her home and Hermione is overcome. She is vaguely aware her name is echoing behind her as she breaks into a run, and she keeps on running until it's nothing but the whisper of a whisper. Until it's lost to the wind.


End file.
